By STEPHEN MOORE Sharron Angle first realized the extent of the brewing revolt against Washington in late March, at a tea party protest in Searchlight, Nev. A "Woodstock of the West," she calls it. "More than 30,000 people sojourned to this tiny rural town of 900 people," Mrs. Angle says. "The highways were jammed up and became parking lots."

To get to the stage, this 60-year-old grandmother of 10 says she "climbed on the back of a Harley Davidson Road King bike and rode through the immense crowds." Once there, she reminded the throng that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid must be replaced.

Now, after sprinting past two better-known and better-funded opponents in the June Republican primary, the party has chosen Mrs. Angle to go up against him. "I knew that if we were going to actually defeat Harry Reid," Mrs. Angle says, "we had to have a candidate who would offer a sharp policy contrast. Someone who would not just pay lip service to limited government principles, but had a solid record of voting that way time and again. I'm that candidate."

Thus has Sharron Angle—a former teacher, business owner, state legislator and political rabble-rouser—emerged as one of the three most prominent figures in the tea party movement. Sarah Palin and Rand Paul of Kentucky are the other two. Her campaign to become the next U.S. Senator from Nevada figures to be among the most closely watched, and surely among the most colorful, contests this November.

Liberal groups and Mr. Reid are gleeful that a "right wing extremist" has won the GOP nomination. At a recent fund raising dinner for the majority leader in Las Vegas, President Barack Obama labeled her "extreme, even for a Republican." Some Republicans privately grumble that she may be unelectable because of her staunchly conservative stands. And to be sure, some of her positions, such as banning fluoridated water or providing massages to rehabilitate convicts, seem a bit, well, odd.

But is she the kook Mr. Reid portrays her as in his TV ads?

I met with Mrs. Angle twice, first in Washington, D.C., late last month, then again during the Freedomfest conference last week in Las Vegas. In person, she seems anything but a threat to the American way of life. She is petite, has Irish red hair with and a pretty round face. She's friendly, but businesslike, and unlike most politicians, comes across as sincere in her convictions. Her husband, Ted, a 35 year veteran of the Bureau of Land Management (he explains that he's a conservative who worked to protect property rights, not violate them), stands constantly by her side as a confidant and de facto campaign manager.

When I ask whether it is really possible to knock off a Senate majority leader, she laughs and replies, "only Reid thinks he's too big to fail." Her strategy against the Reid attack machine is to link him to the lousy economy in Nevada. When I ask her if Nevadans want to give up Mr. Reid's clout in Washington, she replies: "When Harry Reid got to be majority leader, the unemployment rate was 4.4%. Now it is 14%, higher than even in Michigan. . . . What has Harry Reid's power done for our state?" Her new TV ad, unrolled this week, hammers this message. "We know he is going to attack me constantly," she says, because "he can't possibly run on his record."

Despite the deep recession, Mrs. Angle is not impressed by Mr. Reid's desire to extend unemployment benefits. "This only incentivizes folks that could work," Mrs. Angle says, "but can't, because they're making more on unemployment than they can by going back to work. The longer they're out of the work force, their skills become less marketable." Not too many Republicans even in safe seats are willing to speak that truth.

Regarding jobs, she points to Mr. Reid's role in killing three clean coal-fired plants in rural Ely, where she and her husband have lived since 1971. After years of opposition by Mr. Reid in league with various environmental groups, NV Energy halted development of a $5 billion plant in February 2009.

That meant the loss of 5,000 jobs, Mrs. Angle says. "That's really when we realized Harry Reid doesn't care about jobs or people losing their homes. And it's also when 'Anybody but Harry Reid' signs first began to sprout up all over the state."

Sharron Angle's first foray into activism was when her son was held back in kindergarten in 1983 and "the poor little guy was made to feel like a failure. He hated school." She wanted to home school him, but the school system and the courts said no. Her response was to open a one-room school with a Christian-based curriculum. It soon had 24 students.

"I didn't realize how many other parents were angry with the school system," she recalls. She charged $125 a month to cover the cost of supplies but taught for free. (Mrs. Angle has a degree in education from the University of Nevada, Reno.)

In 1985 she rallied hundreds of parents behind her successful effort to pass a bill through the Nevada legislature allowing parents to home school anywhere in the state. The result of her effort is that in Nevada home schooling has become a popular alternative to the public schools, and Mrs. Angle is referred to as the "home school heroine."

"I was just a mother, and the government had gotten between me and my child, and that's like getting between a mother bear and her cubs," she says. "I think that's what activates the tea party movement. What they see is the government interfering with their lives, and with the inheritance of their children. Are we going to pass down liberty or deficits? And that's really what this movement is about." The cub—her 6-year-old son—now has a masters degree and teaches high school history in Yerrington, Nevada.

***Mrs. Angle was later elected to the county school board, and in 1998 she ran for state legislature, where she served for eight tumultuous years. She gained a reputation as a crusader who wouldn't flinch in a battle with the leaders of either party. Critics lampoon the times she cast the lone "no" vote for spending bills. They began to call these votes "62 to Angle," she tells me, smiling.

Mrs. Angle's most legendary fight was within her own party. In 2003, then Gov. Kenny Guinn, a Republican, schemed to raise the sales tax by half a billion dollars. Mr. Guinn declared that anybody who opposed his tax was "irrelevant, irresponsible and cowardly." The governor seemed to be pointing directly at her, says Mrs. Angle. "He knew from the start I would be against it."

The frustrated governor couldn't get the constitutionally required two-thirds vote of approval without her. As she tells the story, "at one critical point, the minority leader asked me: 'So, Sharron, what's your number?' That meant how big a tax increase could I tolerate? And I told them my number was zero."

When the bullying failed, the Nevada Supreme Court, in a spectacular abuse of the constitution, allowed the tax hike to go through without the two-thirds vote. The justices decreed that the money was needed for the schools and that the right to an adequate education took precedence over a procedural safeguard.

The next day, Ms. Angle recalls, "I went into the conference room and was told there's nothing you can do, Sharron. It's all over. The Supreme Court has the last word. And I said, 'No, it's not over.'"

She spearheaded a movement to get the Supreme Court replaced. In the next election in 2006, voters threw out five of the seven members of the Nevada Supreme Court; the other two had retired. "It was a referendum on that tax increase vote," she argues. "And the new court came in and reversed that decision and made our constitution whole."

Democrats think Ms. Angle is a piñata they easily defeat. The attacks run the gamut from her antifluoridation views ("my constituents all opposed" fluoridation), to her desire to abolish the Education Department, to favoring private Social Security accounts.

Mrs. Angle stands her ground: "I support voluntary personal retirement accounts for Social Security," she says. "It should be people's free choice." But she also notes that her 83-year-old mother and 84-year-old mother-in-law are on Social Security and Medicare. "I certainly will work to protect their benefits," she says.

Mrs. Angle is not bashful about wanting to take a knife to what she labels "C-priority programs," including federal agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency. She thinks such bodies should be funded "by the states under the 10th Amendment." As for federal education funding, Mrs. Angle believes it's a drain because control of the schools "should stay as close to the local level as possible, where the child, the teacher, and the parent are the main stakeholders, and make the majority of the decisions.

"If we did that," Mrs. Angle contends, "we would see a lot more money actually spent in the classroom."

The explosion of federal debt under President Obama and Mr. Reid, according to Mrs. Angle, is a moral and economic calamity. "We simply have to stop the Obama-Reid spending and bailouts—now," she says. It's a simple message that resonates with the tea party faithful and Republican voters.

But the key in this Senate race are swing voters—the 20% of Nevada independents who went for Mr. Obama in 2008. The political pros I talked to in the state are skeptical she can win those voters because of their liberal-leaning social views.

Mrs. Angle takes exception to my suggestion that her pro-life and antigay rights positions could hurt her. "This is a state that twice has voted to ban same sex marriages," she reminds me.

***Still, the attack ads seem to be hurting her. A Las Vegas Review-Journal poll this week has the majority leader pulling into the lead for the first time by 44% to 37%. But his approval rating remains well below 50%, which always spells trouble for any incumbent, especially in this agitated political environment.

To win, Sharron Angle is going to need a major money influx from the conservative groups that pushed her over the top in the primary to counter the $25 million Mr. Reid is expected to spend. What Mrs. Angle has going for her is a contagious optimism that Nevadans would never send Mr. Reid back to the Senate given the fiscal carnage in Washington.

Nevada voters, she says, "are disillusioned, disappointed and disgusted with what had happened since the 2008 election. They are tired of this establishment machine that doesn't understand that we—the people— are in control. They are saying 'We don't care if you're a Republican or a Democrat. We don't believe either one of you.'"

She is banking on the depth of this discontent to help her topple the most powerful man in the United States Senate.

I had my first chance to see Rand Paul, I watched on CSPAN a debate sponsored by Kentucky Farm Bureau. The presumption was Paul would do terribly because he opposes farm subsidies. I think the opposite occurred. Every question looked like a softball favoring the pro-freedom, pro-business candidate. Estate tax. EPA defining any water collection as a federal wetland. Carbon tax. Deficits and debt. National Healthcare.

I come from a blue state. Interesting to watch red state Democrats run away from their national leaders. Finally the issues really came down to which side are you going to support for leadership?

Paul looked very good. The Democrat was conservative, sharp and articulate. Too bad their is no place in Washington for a level-headed conservative Democrat to organize.

Roughly Labor Day, if the election were held today - and it isn't - the Republicans would take the House. Discussed elsewhere are some things they could do, but they could pass nothing that would be veto proof.

The senate today is still in question. Real Clear Politics has it at 48 Dems, 45 R's (already a nice gain) and 7 highly contested, 6 of those 7 were Dem seats. The vice President breaks the tie so 50 means nothing. R's need 6 of those 7 for a majority and still would be nowhere near 60 to force any vote and nowhere near veto-proof.

All would seem impossible for Republicans a short time ago, even Florida with 2 (alleged) Republicans running. Logic might assume even races break randomly. History might give the close race to the incumbent for that advantage. The energy and movement this year may say the opposite - that they all break against the failed and unpopular ruling regime.

As a partisan, I will take any win I can get, but Republicans might be better positioned into 2012 for congress and President to still be fighting as the outsiders. For the good of the nation IMHO they must take at least one chamber to at least slow this train wreck.

If that many blue states swung against Obama and his big government 'spread the wealth' economic policies were still failing, it would be interesting to see if he would still hunker down on ideology or read the message, adapt and try to survive as Clinton did by partially working with the other side in the direction of economic growth. At this point, I think everyone sees Obama as unbendable and every key issue would be an unsolvable stalemate.

The November elections may well be the most historic reversal of political power in modern history. Sean Trende at Real Clear Politics thinks over 60 seats in the House could go Republican. Dick Morris is ready to toss another 20 seats into the ante. A more restrained estimate in the high 40s comes from Larry Sabato, who also reminds us the Senate almost always switches parties when the House does.

The usual caveats apply: campaigns will stumble, local issues will come into play, unforeseen events could change the minds of jittery voters, and skeletons have a habit of tumbling from closets around Halloween. Still, it seems very likely the GOP will at least take the House. Thanks to the Tea Party influence, some old RINOs will also be replaced by tough new war elephants.

What then?

The highest priority for Americans is the repeal of ObamaCare, whose damage to our dignity, economy, and health care system is absolutely intolerable. Outright repeal must wait until Obama has been replaced in 2012, but a Republican Congress can neutralize the worst provisions of the bill, sealing its toxic waste into lead-lined containers until we can shoot it off into space and be rid of it.

There is some concern that a successful Republican Congress will engineer enough prosperity to pump air into the Obama re-election campaign. Knowing ObamaCare was dead would send a euphoric surge through an economy that has spent the last couple of years curled up in the corner, hugging itself and whimpering as it awaits the next beating from Democrats. ObamaCare killed tens of thousands of jobs almost immediately, and the weight of its mandates has been crushing job creation, especially among smaller businesses. It seems reasonable to believe its repeal would produce a far stronger surge of payroll expansion than any of the gimmicks being kicked around by statists today.

This is why the election of solid, articulate conservatives to Congress is so essential. If the Republican wave in 2010 is an isolated outpouring of voter anger, we’ll have trouble finishing the job in 2012, and could soon find ourselves right back where we started. It’s not enough for the electorate to “throw the bums out” this year. We have to teach them to build electrified fences topped with razor wire around the federal government, to keep those bums from ever returning.

It takes nothing away from Obama’s failures as President to point out that he did not create our current situation on his own. He bankrupted us, but we were already on shaky financial ground when he arrived. He detonated the deficit to pay off his political allies in the historic “stimulus” heist, but his crew wasn’t the first to roll out of the Treasury with bags of taxpayer swag in their fists. Barack Obama is the absurd final extension of a system that has been dying for longer than most of us have been alive. He didn’t change the course of the State. He just stepped on the gas.

Conservatives underestimate the inertia of that gigantic, doomed engine at their peril. The apparatus of the federal government is like nanotechnology: self-sustaining and self-replicating. Powers it has seized are never returned. Its budgets are never cut. It howls in agony if the rate of budget increase is even slightly reduced. In the past two years, trillions of dollars in new commitments have been added to its bulk. The media will eagerly assist Democrats in strapping the poor and destitute to its hide as armor, to turn away budget-cutting knives.

What will be crucial for Republicans after 2010 is leadership. It is essential to make the voters understand how we got here, and restate the Constitutional principles that render so much of this bloated government utterly immoral, as well as ineffective. Encouraging voters to pour unfocused anger at Obama is ultimately counter-productive, because he didn’t create the crumbling system he presides over. Its foundations were laid long before his birth, and it won’t magically improve as soon as he’s gone.

In fact, letting the voters work out their frustrations on an Obama punching bag is dangerous, because once they’re exhausted, there are far too many ways he could talk them out of their anger. No matter how unpopular he might be now, a Democrat president who enjoys the slavish devotion of the media will always have potent protection against personal criticism. We will be told that failure to re-elect Obama is a sin… an unforgivable act of racism and bigotry, and a hate crime against the vulnerable people he supposedly represents. It is necessary to run against the corrupt and venal system he truly represents.

Look beyond that campaign to 2013, and imagine a political environment in which the signature “achievement” of the Obama presidency is seen as one of the worst mistakes in recent history. The Democrats invested every drop of their political capital in passing it. They twisted arms, cut seedy backroom deals, and ultimately shoved it down the throats of a protesting majority of Americans. Imagine a jubilant nation celebrating the repeal of this disaster, and the defeat of the party that inflicted it on us. Nothing like it has happened in the modern era. Political parties dissolve after that kind of defeat. There will never be more solid ground for conservatives to stand upon, as they begin the daunting task of dismantling the out-of-control system that produced the poisonous notion of socialized medicine. There will never be a better time to return to the just, and effective, principles that guided us before we lost our way in the New Deal and Great Society.

If we fail to create and use that opportunity, our next appeal to the voters will come among the ruins, after a collapse that every one of us should be united in our determination to prevent. There is nothing patriotic about allowing our fellow citizens – even those who hate us – to live through what is coming next. Nothing like it has ever happened in the modern era, either. We stand within a dozen years of watching this mighty nation devour itself in a frenzy of non-negotiable, utterly impossible demands.

Jim Geraghty of National Review relays some sage advice from his political mentor: “This election is not about Obama. It’s about what Democrats have been since 1972.” It’s also about preventing them from assuming their twisted and ravenous state in the future. We need healthy opposition parties. The long-term prosperity, and perhaps survival, of our nation requires the improvement of the Republican Party… and the transformation of the Democrats. That is the great task awaiting us, after the fall.

Democratic operatives are ablaze with excitement over the victory of two particularly dubious Tea Party candidates in Tuesday’s Republican primaries, envisioning smoother paths to victory in the races for governor in New York and United States senator in Delaware. But for voters of all stripes, Tuesday’s primaries should illuminate the growling face of a new fringe in American politics — and provide the incentive for level-headed voters to become enthusiastic about the midterm election.

Republican leaders have to decide if they want the tiny fraction of furious voters who have showed up at the primary polls to steer them into the swamp for years ahead. They have a chance to repudiate the worst of the Tea Party crowd and show that they can govern without appealing to the basest political instincts. So far, they have preferred to greedily capitalize on the nuclear energy in the land without considering its destructive effects.

Democrats, especially beleaguered incumbents and the White House, need to counter the toxic message of the Tea Party so voters have an alternative.

For both parties and certainly the broad swath of independent voters, defeating this new crop of Tea Party nominees has become imperative to avoid the sense of national embarrassment from each divisive and offensive utterance, each wacky policy proposal.

Take the new Republican nominee for United States senator from Delaware, Christine O’Donnell. She founded a group called the Savior’s Alliance for Lifting the Truth, with a curious focus on sexual purity, and claimed there was scientific evidence that God created the world in six 24-hour periods. She lied for years about being a graduate of Fairleigh Dickinson University, having earned a degree only in recent weeks, 17 years after she left campus. She has no steady source of income and has a substantial trail of unpaid bills, battles with the Internal Revenue Service and questionable use of campaign donations for personal expenses.

Ms. O’Donnell defeated Mike Castle, a veteran congressman and example of the moderate and conciliatory approach that Northeast Republicans once brought to Washington. Her campaign ridiculed him for being 71 years old with a history of heart problems. Ms. O’Donnell called Mr. Castle “unmanly.”

Or consider Carl Paladino, the Republicans’ new nominee for governor of New York, who has transfigured the state’s justifiable disgust with Albany into a malevolent snarl at the world. It is one thing to promise to shake up state government; it is very much another to thuggishly proclaim that he intends to clean up Albany “with a baseball bat” and turn the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, upside down to get his blood flowing and then send him “to Attica.” This is the man who has vowed to send welfare recipients to state prisons to pick up their checks and be given lessons in hygiene. He has defended an ally’s comparison of Mr. Silver to Hitler or the Antichrist and is known for forwarding e-mail messages to friends with racist or pornographic images.

In both cases, the Republican establishment did everything possible to avoid having the party be represented by these two, lest the link to the Tea Party become evident. Karl Rove, long the party’s tactical mastermind, dismissed Ms. O’Donnell as “nutty.”

But, in fact, the party’s hopes for retaking Congress are deeply bound up with the fate of Tea Party candidates across the country, and the party’s leaders have done little to distance themselves from the extremism that now constitutes mainstream conservative policy.

When the House Republican leader, John Boehner, voiced a possible compromise on tax cuts, he was immediately shouted down by other party officials and pilloried as weak by right-wing blogs. Mr. Rove noted that Ms. O’Donnell is unlikely to win in November, possibly preventing the Republicans from taking over the Senate. He is now a pariah himself in those same circles.

On Wednesday, Mr. Boehner invited Tea Party activists to help “drive the debate” in Washington and shape the legislative agenda. That invitation act should be a dose of adrenaline to dispirited Democrats, independents and mainstream Republican voters who had not fully grasped the stakes in November’s election.

Fascinating in-fighting to those on the right of center. It was a *shock* to watch Rove on Hannity a few nights ago *trashing* O'Donnel!!! Now he is trying to do damage control by coming on several shows since.

I tend to agree with Krauthammer though on electing candidates who are not strictly conservative if that is what it takes to win and not because I don't agree with them in principle. I am not sure if I agree with Rove or not.

Chris Christy would never have been elected in NJ if we were looking only for strict "conservatives".

Only time will tell if the strict conservatives can appeal to enough indepedents to pull in the less than red states.

Karl Rove: “I think the questions about why she had a problem for five years with paying her federal income taxes, why her house was foreclosed on and put up for a sheriff’s sale, why it took 16 yers for her to settle her college debt and get her diploma after she went around for years claiming she was a college graduate — these and other troubling sort of personal background things, she thinks she has explained them. I think she’s got to — I think a lot of voters in Delaware are going to want more than she’s offering to them right now.”

Republican Party ditches GOP nominee for Colorado governorDan Maes won the primary, but the party is withdrawing its support, saying the 'tea party' candidate is not running a professional campaign.

Reporting from Denver — The Republican Party is walking away from Dan Maes, a small-time businessman and political novice with "tea party" backing who captured Colorado's GOP gubernatorial nomination, scrambling the race less than seven weeks before election day.

Maes has been disavowed by pillars of the Republican establishment — including former Sen. Hank Brown and current U.S. Senate candidate Ken Buck. The chairman of the state Republican Party flatly said Maes is not running a professional campaign and called on him to drop out before ballots were printed Sept. 3. The Republican Governors Assn. refuses to help fund his campaign.

Several tea party groups have withdrawn their backing after it was revealed that Maes misrepresented how he left a Kansas police department, incurred record campaign fines and called Denver's bike-swap program a United Nations plot.

The question now is who will benefit from Maes' hemorrhaging support — his Democratic opponent, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, or former GOP Rep. Tom Tancredo, who is running as a third-party candidate because he thinks Maes is unelectable?

"What may happen is that, with a bit of time, Tancredo becomes viewed as the other major candidate," said Kenneth Bickers, a political scientist at the University of Colorado, who added that he is still reeling from the latest twists in the race. "I didn't see this coming 10 days ago."

Janet Rowland, a Mesa County commissioner who is active in the tea party movement, was one of nearly two dozen Republicans who announced recently that they were switching allegiance to Tancredo.

She said in an interview that this is the first time she hasn't backed a GOP nominee. The entire saga, she added, is a cautionary tale for the insurgent tea party.

"There is a belief by people who are fed up with government that, if they get somebody who hasn't been in politics, they will somehow be more pure," Rowland said.

Maes spokesman Nate Strauch said the establishment's abandonment of the candidate was worrisome.

"The Republican Party in the state has a very specific process for how it chooses its nominees," Strauch said. "It's a process that Dan Maes won fair and square." To turn around and say the votes of those 200,000 people who voted for him "don't count, to reward someone who circumvented the process, sets a dangerous precedent."

Strauch added that many tea party groups still supported Maes.

Maes was a long shot in the Republican primary, up against former Rep. Scott McInnis. He touted himself as a successful businessman, but tax records showed that some years he made little money. A supporter said Maes asked her for help paying his mortgage. He received a record $17,000 campaign fine for paying himself more than $40,000 from his campaign contributions for mileage.

Still, when McInnis acknowledged that he plagiarized a paper on water issues that he was paid $300,000 to write, Maes' support surged. He won the nomination by about 1% of the primary vote.

Two weeks later, the Denver Post reported that Maes' story about how he left a small-town Kansas police department was false. Maes had said he was fired because he had been working undercover for the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, but Kansas officials said Maes never worked for them.

Right away, prominent Republicans began calling for Maes to drop out of the race before ballots were printed, including state party Chairman Dick Wadhams. Maes refused. He raised only $50,000 in August — less than a quarter of Tancredo's haul and an eighth of Hickenlooper's.

In an interview, Wadhams noted that Maes is still the party's nominee but worried that he has yet to assemble a professional campaign team. "To run a real, competitive race in Colorado, you have to have a real campaign," Wadhams said.

Strauch said Maes was not planning to hire any political professionals: "He won the nomination on a shoestring and he's using a similar strategy in the general."

Bay Buchanan, a veteran Washington, D.C.-based operative who is now Tancredo's campaign manager, contended that the onetime congressman, best known for his hard-line stance against illegal immigration, is the only real conservative opposition to Hickenlooper. "We've had enormous movement in the last five to six days," she said last week.

Hickenlooper spokesman George Merritt said the Democratic nominee "is focused on creating jobs, finding ways to support Colorado business, and promoting education."

Former Democratic Sen. Gary Hart, who teaches at the University of Colorado-Denver, said that as the GOP nominee, Maes will inevitably receive a large number of votes in November and split the conservative electorate, handing Hickenlooper a victory.

"Tancredo is whistling past the graveyard," Hart said. "What's interesting about the race is the disarray in the [Republican] party in general. It sought to embrace the tea party movement. When it did, it bought a whole lot of trouble."

Marc Levin's (who mostly I like) ranting and raving aside I will be very pissed if all this conservative stuff winds up keeping the Reps from winning the Senate. OK O'Donnell lets see what you can do besides raise money for a perenial late payer of your own bills. OK Palin lets see what you can do if you are a serious national candidate. I couldn't agree more with Charles on this one:

****The Buckley rule

By Charles Krauthammer

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Tuesday in Delaware was a bad day not only for Republicans but also for conservatives. Tea Partyer Christine O'Donnell scored a stunning victory over establishment Republican Mike Castle. Stunning but pyrrhic. The very people who have most alerted the country to the perils of President Obama's social democratic agenda may have just made it impossible for Republicans to retake the Senate and definitively stop that agenda.

Bill Buckley -- no Mike Castle he -- had a rule: Support the most conservative candidate who is electable.

A timeless rule of sober politics, and particularly timely now. This is no ordinary time. And this is no ordinary Democratic administration. It is highly ideological and ambitious. It is determined to use whatever historical window it is granted to change the country structurally, irreversibly. It has already done so with Obamacare and has equally lofty ambitions for energy, education, immigration, taxation, industrial policy and the composition of the Supreme Court.

That's what makes the eleventh-hour endorsements of O'Donnell by Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and Sarah Palin so reckless and irresponsible.

Of course Mike Castle is a liberal Republican. What do you expect from Delaware? A DeMint? Castle voted against Obamacare and the stimulus. Yes, he voted for cap-and-trade. That's batting .667. You'd rather have a Democrat who bats .000 and who might give the Democrats the 50th vote to control the Senate?

Castle wasn't only electable. He was unbeatable. Why do you think Beau Biden, long groomed to inherit his father's seat, flinched from running? Because Castle, who had already won statewide races a dozen times, scared him off. Democrats had already given up on the race.

O'Donnell, a lifelong activist who has twice lost statewide races, is very problematic. It is not that the Republican establishment denigrates her chances -- virtually every nonpartisan electoral analyst from Charlie Cook to Larry Sabato to Stuart Rothenberg has her losing in November.

Nor is opposition to O'Donnell's candidacy a sign of hostility or disrespect to the Tea Party. Many of those who wanted to see Castle nominated in Delaware have from the beginning defended the Tea Party movement from the mainstream media's scurrilous portrayal of it as a racist rabble of resentful lumpenproletarians. Indeed, it is among the most vigorous and salutary grass-roots movements of our time, dedicated to a genuine constitutionalism from which the country has strayed far.

And its complaint that it is often taken for granted by the Republican establishment (interestingly parallel to the often-heard African American community's complaint against the Democratic Party) is not to be dismissed. Tea Partyers should not, as many of them fear, simply be used by the Republican Party as a source of electoral energy while their own candidates are ignored and dismissed. But the question is: Which of their candidates?

Marco Rubio in Florida is strong, serious, dynamic. He has a great future as a Republican leader. Joe Miller, who upset the Murkowski dynasty in Alaska, is a man of remarkable achievement: West Point graduate, decorated veteran, judge. Both will win.

Moreover, geography matters. Rand Paul may not be the best candidate in the world -- it is not a very good idea to start your general election campaign by expressing reservations about the Civil Rights Act -- but he is running in Kentucky. He will almost certainly win.

Delaware is not Kentucky. If Republicans want to be a national party, they cannot write off the Northeast, whose Republicanism is of a distinctly moderate variety. Scott Brown broke Republican ranks to vote for Obama's financial reform. Are conservatives going to now run him out of the Senate? Wasn't it just eight months ago that his victory in Massachusetts was hailed as a turning point in the campaign to stop the Obama agenda?

You don't stop that agenda by nominating an O'Donnell in Delaware and turning a Senate seat from safe Republican to safe Democratic.

If DeMint and Palin want to show that helping O'Donnell over the top -- she won late and by six points -- wasn't a capricious spreading of fairy dust, perhaps they should go to Delaware now and get her elected to the Senate.

You made it possible. Now make it happen. I would be happy to be proved wrong about O'Donnell's electability -- I want Republicans to win that 51st seat. Stay in Delaware and show us you were right. The beaches are said to be lovely in the fall.***

Coons, 47, has already been targeted by Republicans for an article he wrote for the Amherst College newspaper when he was 21 -- a piece entitled "Chris Coons: The Making of a Bearded Marxist."

Coons wrote about his political evolution from a conservative college student who founded the Amherst College Republicans into a Democrat suspicious of America's power and ideals. The transformation, he said, came during a trip to Kenya.

Coons alluded to his past in a debate Thursday with O'Donnell, saying Delaware residents are interested in what candidates will do to create jobs, reduce the national debt and fix what he called a broken political system in Washington, and that they're not "particularly interested in statements that either of us made 20 or 30 years ago."

If It Is a Fight These Jacobins Want, Then It Is a Fight They Shall Have

T. Coddington Van Voorhees VIIConservative Intellectual At-Large

Such are the vicissitudes of our current political zeitgeist that Homo Republicanus is each day forced to endure a fresh assault on his intelligence somehow more insulting than the last. Doubly insulting, as you no doubt imagine, when the Homo in question is me. Contrary to what you may assume, the gift of intellectual acuity and foresight can in times like these prove to be an almost unbearable cross; I shall not use this space to recount the many unheeded warnings I have issued to fellow Republicans regarding the growing menace of the soi dissant "Tea Party" faction, other than to note that as a Cassandra I have, if anything, proven to be insufficiently alarmist.

The latest proof of this assertion came with Wednesday morning's grapefruit and New York Times, borne as always on the old family serving cart by Farquhar the old family butler. According to Van Voorhees lore the sterling conveyance was acquired by T. Coddington II during some long-forgotten 19th century Panic, from a newly destitute Albany canal boat nabob to whom he had lent a small ransom. Unable to repay his bonds, the man offered great-great-great grandpapa the serving cart in a desperate act of supplicancy to stave off a well-deserved thrashing from TC2's diamond-tipped swagger stick. Although it would not so avail him that day, the old tarnished trolley now serves as a handsome household heirloom. And, if the appraisers of Sotheby's are to be trusted, a lasting tribute to the Van Voorhees' famed financial clairvoyance. As for Farquhar, I would note that he has become in his own way an equally treasured family keepsake, having now faithfully served four generations of Van Voorheeses without complaint and without once taking a holiday. Though well into his late nineties and afflicted with the St. Vitus Dance, the old Irishman continues to do so today. As a lad I once queried my grandfather as to Farquhar's remarkable loyalty; in reply he explained that Farquhar was a penniless immigrant beggar waif when TC5 first discovered him at the Cunard docks in 1921; a wretched urchin possessing neither passport nor prospects, and with a Sinn Fein bounty on his head. In pity TC5 remanded young Farquhar to the custody of his household staff, who tutored him in the fine points of servantry and US deportation laws. Although his duties have for the most part been delegated to other members of our current household staff, I still request that he bring me my morning paper and grapefruit; for even as Mariska complains of his smell, the sight of the dear old chap hobbling into the breakfast room with the old serving cart provides a comforting reminder of a saner era when living was gracious and Republicans knew how to comport themselves.

But I digress. I was, as you might imagine, eager to read the results of the previous evening's Republican U.S. Senate primary in Delaware. Normally I would have followed the returns by live television, but Mariska and I were otherwise engaged as hosts of a black-tie fundraiser for our new charity program, Inner City Badminton, along with our dear friends from the firmament of conservative punditry, Kathleen Parker and David Brooks. Together we passionately believe that by introducing the "grand old pastime" to the hiphop community, we will in some small way begin to repair the incalculable damage done to Republican-African American relations by the racially tactless Tea Party idiots. Spirits were quite festive, especially after Parker, Brooks and the Rev. Sharpton became entangled in a badminton net during a Tom Collins-fueled limbo tournament. By the time they were freed we were all too giddy and exhausted to worry about election returns. Indeed, why should we? For the most part, the damage inflicted by the Tea Partyists has been confined to the hinterlands west of the Alleghenies and south of Washington, so it seemed somewhat absurd to suggest that their benighted candidates might actually find success in one of the better states like Delaware. Yes, I am aware of Mr. Scott Brown in Massachusetts, but as I have noted before, that particular electoral fluke can be readily explained by Brown's erotic appeal to his state's famously nymphomaniacal womenfolk. Once Senator Adonis suffers the ravages of time and gravity, I have every confidence Massachusetts will return, chastened, to its traditional progressive heritage. But Delaware? With its long record of electing deep, gravitas-laden men such as Joe Biden (who, despite suffering over 1500 sun strokes, cerebral infarctions, and hematomae over the last 10 years, retains a reputation as one of Washington's brightest minds) the 'First State' seemed the last state to be seduced by the Tea Partyist's inane lowbrow "smaller gubmint" hillbilly bunkum.

Thus I assumed when the Delaware Republican party approached me last week requesting high-level strategic advice it was in regards to the November general election. Mr. Biden's elevation to the executive branch created an open Senate seat and, mercifully, a rare moment of kismet for moderate and intellectual conservatives; here, at last, the right kind of seat, for the right kind of state, and the right kind of candidate in Mr. Mike Castle. With his nomination a forgone conclusion and a voting record scarcely distinguishable from Mr. Biden's, Mr. Castle would be undoubtedly competitive in November and could be supported by a better stripe of conservative without fear of Washington social embarrassment. Better yet, his nomination would represent a return to the rational conservatism which has been all but eclipsed by the dark moon of Tea Party lunacy. All that remained to formulate a strategy to position Mr. Castle further to the center for the general election, and to make arrangements for cocktails; two task for which I am eminently qualified and brimming with ideas. Instead, I was mortified to learn from party officials that they were in fact seeking help in parrying a primary challenge to Mr. Castle from a dark horse Republican who was in the midst of a last minute charge in the polls.

Who was this mysterious rival, I inquired - some heretofore unknown Machiavellian prodigy from Harvard poli sci? An old-money interloper from the Philadelphia Mainline? Neither, they said. The challenge, they explained, came in the form of one "Christine O'Donnell," a financially destitute 37-year old Tea Party schoolgirl whose intellectual heft by comparison made even la Palin look Obamanesque. I then watched in abject horror as they played a video of her crusading against teenage onanism. I admit no great pride in my own occasional participation in that unseemly adolescent pastime, but what sort of person declaims it on MTV? And what sort of party allows her name to appear on an official primary ballot? And that is when it struck me: I was obviously now witnessing the premise of an elaborate practical joke. Delawareans have long been known as the irascible pranksters of East Coast Republicanism, and to be selected as the target of their good-natured japery is in some fashion an honor. Even though the stunt nearly led to his untimely demise, the very first T. Coddington Van Voorhees himself reportedly enjoyed a hearty laugh after his waggish Delaware friend E. I. du Pont replaced his trusty dueling pistol with a replica that egested a comical "BANG" flag. Not wanting to spoil their fun, I did not let on to the Delaware party officials that I was wise to their little joke. Instead, I played along and counseled them to run a last minute, no-holds-barred negative media blitz against their impossibly fictional "Tea Party candidate."

And thus I awaited with wry anticipation as Farquhar slowly traversed the breakfast room with the cart bearing the punchline to the Delawareans' clever prank. This was followed by gales of riotous laughter when I discovered the wags had printed an entire mock edition of the New York Times announcing their satirical "Miss O'Donnell" had actually won the race! I was so overcome with mirth that I kicked over the cart, spilling grapefruit across the marble. As Farquhar trembled back to the kitchens to retrieve the mop, I reached for the ringing telephone prepared to hear the voice of the Delaware GOP chairman crowing about his ingenious drollery. Instead I was greeted with the panicked entreaties of none other that Mr. Castle himself, joined by the Republican National Congressional Committee brain trust, insisting against all rational evidence that Miss O'Donnell was in fact real and that she had indeed won the contest. I conducted an incredulous review of the cable news channels, which confirmed their wild story. I called the kitchen intercom and bade Farquhar fetch me a stiff drink on his way back with the mop.

What followed, I will state with no small amount of confidence, was the birth of a mighty counterrevolution to wrest the cause of conservatism back from the would-be mobs.

"Gentlemen, at long last it is time to draw a line in the sand," I announced. "For too long we have stood by idly while these insipid cretins - the Palins, the Limbaughs, the Becks - have run roughshod over our once proud party, making it a mockery and ruining our social standing, advancing the insane notion that years of Washington experience and good breeding are somehow trumped by idiotic pledges to dismantle the very government on which their very existence depends. Well, my friends, I say unto you, with this Delaware disaster they have gone a bridge too far. Today we begin the counterattack, and we will make it plain to the insurrectionists that they shan't see another dime of our inheritances."

The polite huzzahs and claps emanating from the speaker-phone indicated to me that my call to arms was striking a chord within the heart of traditional Republicanism. Heartened, I pressed on.

"If it is a fight the Jacobins want, then it is a fight they shall have," I added with a pugilistic flourish. "And let this be their warning - I once took 4th place in the East Hampton Silver Gloves boxing tournament."

My battle cry was greeted, as you might imagine, with a lusty cheer the likes of which had not been heard since the eve of Agincourt. And justly so; for in the course of human events, there comes a time when a well bred man must roll up his cashmere sleeves, grab the old family swagger stick, and remind the rabble of their proper place.

Take Farquhar, for instance. I swear the old fool just offered me an obscene gesture.

O’Donnell will be only half the equation in November. The other half is New Castle County Executive Chris Coons. As this Delaware blogger observes, Coons is a virtual unknown for Delawareans outside New Castle County. His national fame has been growing exponentially in the past 48 hours, however, as the blogosphere explodes with link upon link to excerpts from his 1985, Amherst-student-era oeuvre “Chris Coons: The Making of a Bearded Marxist.”

Now, we all wrote stupid stuff when we were 22. But it seems almost laughably hapless of Coons to have written his because he went to Kenya (yes) and came back with thoughts like these:

“I became friends with a very wealthy businessman and his family and heard them reiterate the same beliefs held by many Americans: the poor are poor because they are lazy, slovenly, uneducated,” wrote Coons. “I realize that Kenya and America are very different, but experiences like this warned me that my own favorite beliefs in the miracles of free enterprise and the boundless opportunities to be had in America were largely untrue.”

Naturally, Coons’ prior experience in the classroom had prepared him for this enlightenment:

A course on cultural anthropology, noted Coons, had “undermined the accepted value of progress and the cultural superiority of the West,” while a class on the Vietnam War led him to “suspect…that the ideal of America as a ‘beacon of freedom and justice, providing hope for the world’ was not exactly based in reality.”

Fortunately:

Coons wrote that upon his return to Amherst for his senior year he realized that, while he had discovered the faults of his country, he had also “returned to loving America.”

Awesome, dude.

The thing about Coons, Bearded Marxist, is not so much that he underwent the celebrated, if-you’re-not-a-leftist-at-20 rite of passage. It’s that he checked every block then, on the official One-Note Leftist list – and he has just kept checking them ever since. Coons appears to be about as politics-as-usual, more-of-same, tax-and-spend-and-spend-some-more as it gets. He’s an archetype. He is, in fact, what an astonishing number of Delaware voters considered themselves to be rejecting, by voting for O’Donnell on Tuesday.

Even before Christine O’Donnell handily defeated Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.) in an epic upset Tuesday night, the Tea Parties, all of them, had already won. No matter what happens in the midterm elections on Nov. 2, the Tea Party has moved the Democrats to the right and the Republicans even more so, and President Obama’s agenda is dead.

Anger from disaffected conservatives who sat quietly through eight years of the surplus-to-deficit presidency of George W. Bush bubbled up immediately after Obama took office. All it took was the unprecedented $787 billion stimulus package, and before Obama could mark his first 100 days in office, a movement was born. Some of the already angry yet newly active were libertarian supporters of Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), and almost all of them were fuming over the Troubled Asset Relief Program of 2008, the bipartisan bailout of Wall Street that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) voted for and that his running mate, then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R), supported.

What debuted in nationwide protests on April 15, 2009, has taken less than 18 months to become the current driving force in American politics. The Tea Party insurgency will not only cost Democrats dozens of seats in Congress, and likely their majority — it will define the coming GOP presidential nominating process, determine the direction of the GOP for years to come and threaten any remaining plans Obama has for sweeping reforms of education, energy policy or our immigration system. Last March, Republicans joined Democrats in calling on Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) to end his filibuster against the extension of unemployment benefits paid for by deficit spending, embarrassed he was blocking aid to the jobless. But it took just three months for the grassroots pressure to reach the Capitol — Bunning was a Tea Party hero. By the time the $30 billion expired on June 2, Senate Republicans had united behind a nearly two-month filibuster of the next round of $34 billion in “emergency spending” for unemployment insurance. They were joined by Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), and some House Democrats warned their own leaders at the time that the days of votes on “emergency spending” would soon have to come to an end.

As of last week, before the House and Senate even reconvened, it was clear there were enough Senate Democrats joining Republicans seeking an extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest earners that the Democrats don’t have the votes to pass President Obama’s permanent extension of the middle-class tax cuts without passing cuts for the top two tax brackets as well.

When Obama introduced his latest economic proposals earlier this month, Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), an ally of the Obama White House, immediately put out a statement not only criticizing Obama’s newest infrastructure plan but knocking the original stimulus as well. “I will not support additional spending in a second stimulus package. Any new transportation initiatives can be funded through the Recovery Act, which still contains unused funds,” Bennet said.

Obama won’t get his infrastructure plan through the Congress, and he knows it. Next year, when he is running for reelection, tax and budget reform will be the only issues he could realistically work on with a GOP majority or a razor-thin Democratic majority. In other words, the Tea Party agenda.

The Tea Party candidates themselves — like O’Donnell, whom Karl Rove called “nutty,” — matter little. Only a few will actually get elected this fall. Yet the Tea Party has won without them. There are no tea leaves left to read. Democrats have been spooked and Republicans threatened, cajoled or cleansed. The results are already in.

I agree, no big deal. MSLSD covers this like it is some sort of major scandal. Yet when da bamster spoke about using cocaine there was silence. Got to protect the ONE.

****ABC News By RANDALL CHASE, Associated Press Writer Randall Chase, Associated Press Writer – Sun Sep 19, 5:24 pm ETLINCOLN, Del. – Republican Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell is making light of comments she made more than a decade ago when she was in high school about having dabbled in witchcraft.

"How many of you didn't hang out with questionable folks in high school?" she asked fellow Republicans at a GOP picnic in southern Delaware on Sunday.

"There's been no witchcraft since. If there was, Karl Rove would be a supporter now," O'Donnell jokingly assured the crowd.

Rove, the former GOP strategist and adviser to President George W. Bush, has suggested that O'Donnell's win in last week's GOP primary cost Republicans a chance to retake the Senate seat long held by Democrat Joe Biden before he was elected vice president.

O'Donnell, a conservative Christian activist, rode a surging tide of tea party activism to an upset victory over GOP moderate Michael Castle, Delaware's longtime congressman and former two-term governor. She faces Democratic county executive Chris Coons in November.

O'Donnell's comments about witchcraft were made during a 1999 taping of comedian Bill Maher's "Politically Incorrect" show.

"I dabbled into witchcraft. I never joined a coven," she said on the show, a clip of which hit the Internet as O'Donnell canceled Sunday appearances on two national news shows, citing commitments to attend church and the GOP picnic in Delaware.

"I hung around people who were doing these things. I'm not making this stuff up. I know what they told me they do," O'Donnell told Maher.

"One of my first dates with a witch was on a satanic altar, and I didn't know it. I mean, there's little blood there and stuff like that," she said. "We went to a movie and then had a little midnight picnic on a satanic altar."

Russ Murphy, executive director of the 9-12 Delaware Patriots, a group that joined in the tea party effort to propel O'Donnell to Tuesday's primary victory, said the focus on her comments about witchcraft was just another attempt by pundits and political opponents to discredit her.

"They're going to be pulling for straws from the sky to do anything to stop this momentum, and they don't realize it's not going to work," he said.

O'Donnell's victory in the primary came after a bruising campaign in which her supporters and Castle's, led by state GOP chairman Tom Ross, traded attack ads, with Ross saying O'Donnell was a liar and a fraud who couldn't be elected dogcatcher.

Ross did not attend Sunday's Sussex County Republican Committee picnic. Sussex County GOP chairman Ron Sams said Ross was in Washington trying to drum up support from the national GOP campaign committees.

Despite her improbable primary victory, O'Donnell sounded upbeat about her chances in November.

"We're going to win this by uniting the party," she told supporters. "I'm very confident that we're going to win this election."****

Bought a property well below value - a popular bribery scheme apparantly rampant amongst those who bribe politicians. Look at the bamster. Another is cattle futures. Another is owing property near where the house member gets approval for federal money to build a highway there (several examples of this scheme). Another is having contractors fix up your house (ala Stevens).

Government Motors Makes Political Donations ... Mostly to DemocratsHmm.

BY DANIEL HALPERSeptember 22, 2010 2:45 PM SHARETHIS

The Wall Street Journal today reports that General Motors has "begun to once again contribute to political campaigns, lifting a self-imposed ban on political spending put in place during the auto maker's U.S.-financed bankruptcy restructuring last year." That means, the automaker that Americans purchased in 2009, because it was too big to fail, is now giving money to American politicians.

Corporations, and individuals for that matter, give political donations to show support for politicians and their policies. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. But this is an extraordinary case: The U.S. government owns more than half of the company that's giving to political causes, hoping to influence, or at least support, political causes that it believes are favorable to GM's cause. But that's happening on the U.S. taxpayer's dime.

And guess which political party is the greatest beneficiary of GM's political donations? That's right, the majority party (for now). As the Wall Street Journal reports:

Interesting theory. Those Dem districts that are in trouble for the Dems were those where the Dems favored the Hillary and not Bamster in 2008. It may be that those Dems are not running away from the Bamster as much as they were not strongly for him to start with. More weight to my theory that there will be a dem groundswell of voices calling for the return of the Hill. It is just a matter of time till Obama's poll numbers fall so much and hit a ciritical mass that the lame stream media will pick up on this.

****Victory in paradise?

By George Will

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | LANGHORNE, Pa. — From the 1930s through the 1950s, Bucks County northeast of Philadelphia acquired a glamorous reputation as a retreat for Manhattan celebrities, including Oscar Hammerstein, who, according to local legend, was inspired by the view from his Doylestown front porch to write "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'," the opening song of "Oklahoma!" Today the county, which is 93 percent of Pennsylvania's 8th Congressional District, figures in Republicans' plans to sing that song on the morning of Nov. 3.

The district has about 209,000 Democrats, 189,000 Republicans and 66,000 independents. The seat is held by a Democrat, Patrick Murphy, 36, the first Iraq War veteran to serve in Congress. He was elected in 2006 when he defeated the one-term Republican incumbent, Mike Fitzpatrick, 47, an attorney, who is Murphy's opponent again this year.

More than half of the 7 percent of the district that is not in Bucks County is in northeast Philadelphia, where a lot of the city's police and firefighters live — they are required to reside in the city — and many conservative Democrats, too. The remainder of the district is in suburban Montgomery County. Lower Bucks County is primarily blue collar, the upper county is agricultural and the central portion is an upper-income bedroom community for Philadelphia.

Fitzpatrick, who had been a Bucks County commissioner for 10 years, won in 2004, a good Republican year. He lost in the Republicans' annus horribilis of 2006, when they suffered the first of two consecutive wave elections. (In a wave, a party gains or loses a net of at least 20 seats in the House of Representatives.) The Democrats' 2006 candidate for governor was Ed Rendell, the former Philadelphia mayor who was much loved in the suburbs for making the central city — he was called the "mayor from Pine to Vine," two downtown streets — safe for them to go in for meals and entertainment. Rendell defeated his Republican opponent in the 8th District by 40 points. So, 2006 was a Republican nightmare: incumbent U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum lost the district by 20 percent.

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Still, Fitzpatrick lost by just 1,518 votes out of 249,817 cast, and he carried the Bucks County portion of the district. He did not attempt a comeback in 2008 because he was receiving chemotherapy and radiation for colon cancer. He is now well.

Although Bill Clinton campaigned for Murphy in 2006, perhaps with his wife's 2008 presidential candidacy in mind, Murphy became the first Pennsylvanian holding federal office to endorse Barack Obama's candidacy. Today, the Clinton-Obama contest still reverberates.

Political analyst Charles Cook doesn't hire dummies, and one of his talented associates, David Wasserman, has this theory: Democratic members of Congress who are in peril are disproportionately from districts where Democrats preferred Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama in 2008. She decisively beat Obama in the 8th District with 63 percent, and in November 2008 her voters were not Obama swooners: They simply hired him to fix the economy.

Murphy has voted with Speaker Nancy Pelosi 97 percent of the time, including on the stimulus, health care, cash for clunkers, the cap-and-trade climate legislation and organized labor's priority, "card check," which would abolish workers' rights to secret ballot elections in workplace unionization decisions. Fitzpatrick is a centrist in a Republican Party where the center is migrating to the right. He favors extending all the Bush tax cuts and rescinding to the Treasury all unspent TARP and stimulus funds.

The 8th is a swing district that should swing in a year like this. Polls indicate, however, that the race is not yet settled.

Fitzpatrick says that although he was his family's first Republican, his seven siblings have all seen the light. He and they grew up in the 8th District, in Levittown, one of the instant suburbs (the first, also called Levittown, is on Long Island) that were mass produced after World War II by William Levitt. They were incubators of the postwar middle class, many of whose members' bought their first homes from Levitt for $7,990.

Bucks County is emblematic of not only 20th-century America, but 18th-century America, too. It was from the Bucks County bank of the Delaware River that George Washington, on Christmas night, 1776, launched the boats that carried the attackers that surprised the Hessians in Trenton. Republicans hope that on Nov. 2 a piece of another, if rather less momentous, moment in America's political evolution will occur.****

Visigoths at the gate? By Charles KrauthammerFriday, September 24, 2010

When facing a tsunami, what do you do? Pray, and tell yourself stories. I am not privy to the Democrats' private prayers, but I do hear the stories they're telling themselves. The new meme is that there's a civil war raging in the Republican Party. The Tea Party will wreck it from within and prove to be the Democrats' salvation.

I don't blame anyone for seeking a deus ex machina when about to be swept out to sea. But this salvation du jour is flimsier than most.

In fact, the big political story of the year is the contrary: that a spontaneous and quite anarchic movement with no recognized leadership or discernible organization has been merged with such relative ease into the Republican Party.

The Tea Party could have become Perot '92, an anti-government movement that spurned the Republicans, went third-party and cost George H.W. Bush reelection, ending 12 years of Republican rule. Had the Tea Party gone that route, it would have drained the Republican Party of its most mobilized supporters and deprived Republicans of the sweeping victory that awaits them on Nov. 2.

Instead, it planted its flag within the party and, with its remarkable energy, created the enthusiasm gap. Such gaps are measurable. This one is a chasm. This year's turnout for the Democratic primaries (as a percentage of eligible voters) was the lowest ever recorded. Republican turnout was the highest since 1970.

True, Christine O'Donnell's nomination in Delaware may cost the Republicans an otherwise safe seat (and possibly control of the Senate), and Sharron Angle in Nevada is running only neck-and-neck with an unpopular Harry Reid. On balance, however, the Tea Party contribution is a large net plus, with its support for such strong candidates as Marco Rubio of Florida, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, Joe Miller of Alaska, Mike Lee of Utah. Even Rand Paul, he of the shaky start in Kentucky, sports an eight-point lead. All this in addition to the significant Tea Party contribution to the tide that will carry dozens of Republicans into the House.

Nonetheless, some Democrats have convinced themselves that they have found the issue with which to salvage 2010. "President Obama's political advisers," reports the New York Times, "are considering a range of ideas, including national advertisements, to cast the Republican Party as all but taken over by Tea Party extremists."

Sweet irony. Fear-over-hope rides again, this time with Democrats in the saddle warning darkly about "the Republican Tea Party" (Joe Biden). Message: Vote Democratic and save the nation from a Visigoth mob with a barely concealed tinge of racism.

First, this is so at variance with reality that it's hard to believe even liberals believe it. The largest Tea Party event yet was the recent Glenn Beck rally on the Mall. The hordes descending turned out to be several hundred thousand cheerful folks in what, by all accounts, had the feel of a church picnic. And they left the place nearly spotless -- the first revolution in recorded history that collected its own trash.

Second, the general public is fairly evenly split in its views of the Tea Party. It experiences none of the horror that liberals do -- and think others should. Moreover, the electorate supports by 2-to-1 the Tea Party signature issues of smaller government and lower taxes.

Third, you would hardly vote against the Republican in your state just because there might be a (perceived) too-conservative Republican running somewhere else. How would, say, Paul running in Kentucky deter someone from voting for Mark Kirk in Illinois? Or, to flip the parties, will anyone in Nevada refuse to vote for Harry Reid because Chris Coons, a once self-described "bearded Marxist," is running as a Democrat in Delaware?

Fourth, what sane Democrat wants to nationalize an election at a time of 9.6 percent unemployment and such disappointment with Obama that just this week several of his own dreamy 2008 supporters turned on him at a cozy town hall? The Democrats' only hope is to run local campaigns on local issues. That's how John Murtha's former district director hung on to his boss's seat in a special election in Pennsylvania.

Newt Gingrich had to work hard -- getting Republican candidates to sign the Contract with America -- to nationalize the election that swept Republicans to victory in 1994. A Democratic anti-Tea Party campaign would do that for the Republicans -- nationalize the election, gratis -- in 2010. As a very recent former president -- now preferred (Public Policy Polling, Sept. 1) in bellwether Ohio over the current one by 50 percent to 42 percent -- once said: Bring 'em on.

Current projections suggest that the Democrats would hold 51 seats after Election Day while the Republicans would hold 45. Four states are in the Toss-Up category (Colorado, Illinois, Nevada, and Wisconsin). All four Toss-Ups are seats currently held by Democrats.

Republicans have the edge in four Democratic-held Senate seats--Arkansas, Indiana, North Dakota, and Pennsylvania.

At the moment, no Republican-held seats appear headed for the Democratic column.

The state results and overall projections will be updated whenever new polling data justifies a change (to learn how Rasmussen Reports determines its Balance of Power rankings, click here).

In the table below, the states marked in red currently have a Republican senator. Those in blue currently have a Democratic senator.

ShareThisRasmussen Reports is an electronic media company specializing in the collection, publication and distribution of public opinion polling information. We poll on a variety of topics in the fields of politics, business and lifestyle, updating our site’s content on a news cycle throughout the day, everyday.

Rasmussen Reports Platinum Members get an all-access pass to polling news, analysis and insight not available to the general public.

Scott Rasmussen, president of Rasmussen Reports, has been an independent pollster for more than a decade. To learn more about our methodology, click here. United States Senate Balance of Power Tables: Current Projected Result Democrats 51

Republicans 45

Toss-Up 4

Election 2010 To Date Solid Democratic 6

Leans Democratic 5

Toss-Up 4

Leans Republican 5

Solid Republican 17

No Senate Race In 2010 Democrats 40

Republicans 23

*Independent Senators and candidates in CT, FL and VT are counted here as Democrats

Democrats seeking to boost voter turnout this fall are beginning to sound like the late comedian Chris Farley's portrayal of a "motivational speaker" on Saturday Night Live. Farley's character sought to inspire young people by announcing that they wouldn't amount to "jack squat" and would someday be "living in a van down by the river."

Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, who prefers sailing vessels to vans by the river, recently tried out the Farley method. Said Mr. Kerry, "We have an electorate that doesn't always pay that much attention to what's going on so people are influenced by a simple slogan rather than the facts or the truth or what's happening." Bay State voters are surely thrilled to be represented by a man so respectful of their concerns.

This week President Obama chimed in with another uplifting message about the American electorate. Mr. Obama told Rolling Stone that the tea party movement is financed and directed by "powerful, special-interest lobbies." But this doesn't mean that tea party groups are composed entirely of corporate puppets. Mr. Obama graciously implied that a small subset of the movement is simply motivated by bigotry.

The President said "there are probably some aspects of the Tea Party that are a little darker, that have to do with anti-immigrant sentiment or are troubled by what I represent as the President." The tea party is now supported by a third of the country in some polls.

Perhaps advocates for smaller government shouldn't take Mr. Obama's comments personally. In the new Democratic attacks on the voting public, not even Democrats are spared. Vice President Joe Biden recently urged the party's base to "stop whining" and "buck up," a message echoed by Mr. Obama in his Rolling Stone interview. The President demanded that his supporters "shake off this lethargy," warning that it would be "inexcusable" for liberals to stay home on Election Day.

Mr. Obama added that "if people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren't serious in the first place." Making the case for left-wing voters to show up in November, Mr. Obama told Rolling Stone that he is presiding over "the most successful administration in a generation in moving progressive agendas forward."

We'd agree, but his problem is that most Americans don't like that agenda and millions of voters in both parties wanted him to oversee an economic expansion instead. Blaming the voters is not unheard of among politicians, but usually they wait until after an election.

This morning he waded further into the subject, telling me he's "very seriously" contemplating a White House run in 2012 and that he's begun consulting with high-level campaign operatives to discuss feasibility and logistics. Bolton cited what he described as President Obama's failures, the "wide open" Republican field, and the knowledge and experience he could bring to the table as the primary factors that sparked his interest in running**Oh yes!**

I have not really heard him discuss economics, so I will keep an ear open for that.

That said, my intended point is a bit more amorphous than that.

Following Carl Jung's analysis, people have one of four dominant functions: Thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition. I suspect most of us here have thinking as their dominant modality, yet thinkers are about only 10% of the population. A good politician must be able to communicate in the language(s) which most voters understand e.g. emotion. Reagan was great at this. So was candidate Obama. Alan Keyes (inter alia, BO's last minute opponent for US Senate from Illinois) is brilliant, yet he is virtually 100% thinker and as such is utterly tone deaf to human emotion and therefore a poor candidate. I suspect a similar dynamic with Bolton, though to a far lesser degree than Keyes.

Bolton was a diplomat. Just one that would not lick the boots of evil nations like the careerist state department mandarins and democrats insist upon doing.

America is teetering at a tipping point. We have a very narrow window in which to reverse the end of the American experiment. In 2012, we need an executive with the skillset to pull us out of the death spiral. I think the majority of Americans are seeing firsthand that no matter how you dress up an empty suit with inane slogans and fake greek columns, the office actually requires intelligence and competence.

On that same vein, whoever wins the R. nomination (if not Bolton) will have to debate and defeat him. They better start seriously preparing now.

My introduction to Bolton was the liberal uproar when he was picked for UN Ambassador. He seems to be a consistent hawk, which is mostly good to me but with less appeal over on the RINO side of the party.

UN Ambassador I think was George Bush senior's highest job when he was thought to be so highly qualified in 1980. He was widely respected for being a moderate but when the party and the nation needed a sharp u-turn toward security and growth, they didn't pick the moderate. They picked a conservative clear in his convictions. Maybe Bolton can be that, he has a clarity and confidence about him, but I don't think he will start near the front of the pack - nor does he.

He will be ridiculed for his call to bomb Iran, but that criticism may backfire by Nov. 2012. By then the threat posed by Iran's nuclear reality could be a serious concern.

We mentioned our favorite dark-horse candidate for president, John Bolton, yesterday. I checked in with him about the state of his campaign.

First, on its rationale, “We just don’t have enough discussion on national security. Obama views it as a distraction. None of our candidates are talking about it on a serious, sustained basis.”

On the long odds: “I have absolutely no illusions as someone who hasn’t run for elective office before. But I have been talking to people about it to find out whether they break out laughing. I’m sometimes met with a dumbfounded look when I mention it, but most of people then say, ‘Well, why not?’”

On his foreign-policy focus when a presidential campaign will have to be more wide-ranging: “Before the Bush 43 administration and since I left, I spent all those years at AEI, surrounded by the best economists in the country. I have absorbed a lot of that. And don’t forget: I worked in Ed Meese’s Justice Department when he was formulating the case for originalism and I was a student of Robert Bork’s and the law-and-economics school of thought.”----I will be giving Bolton a serious look. - Doug

My first time posting a Frank Rich opinion from the NY Times. He makes the point that her trouble in finding jobs, paying bills, keeping a home, even writing a resume, may resonate with more people than some would expect. (More so than others with maid problems etc.)-----http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/opinion/03rich.html

"The more O’Donnell is vilified, the bigger the star she becomes, and the more she can reinforce the Tea Party’s preferred narrative as “a spontaneous and quite anarchic movement” (in the recent words of the pundit Charles Krauthammer) populated only by everyday folk upset by big government and the deficit."-----Rich's real point is that she is an idiot following a Palin script and the movement is phony, has links to billionaire backers etc. (No mention of Dems like the MN Dem Gov candidate whose biggest contributor is his ex-wife, a Rockefeller big oil money.)

For man or woman who has a command of the English language, has good expression of thought skills, charisma, charm, leadership qualities, conservative views, and adaptability.

Doug writes:

"whoever wins the R. nomination (if not Bolton) will have to debate and defeat him. They better start seriously preparing now."

I couldn't agree more. I really think it will all come down to who sounds better and can out talk the other. Presentation appears to win out over substance, at least in the short term. Schwartzenegger who I no longer have much admiration for, recently predicted Dah-bamster will win in 2012 did so for just this reason (speaking ability). Terminated does not feel there are any Republicans who can out speak Bamster.

Bolten clearly has an excellent command of the English language (like another Harvard grad - Bill O'Reilly) and can think and speak his mind fluently. Gingrich is close. If only Gingirch had the touchy feely effect that Bill Clinton is able to con some people with. The "I feel your pain thing" apparently does sell to many. Roosevelt had that I think. Almost the loving fatherly touch.

I don't think Bolten has that - or at least he doesn't portray that. But I have a sense from him he is able to adapt and learn. He has certainly had my impressed ear whenever I get the opportunity to hear him being interviewed.

ON another note, I know some don't like him, but I think Dick Morris would be s much better strategist than Karl Rove. I would like to see Morris and Bolten or Morris with whoever has the best chance of debating the one. Morris clearly got Clinton re-elected. Getting him to go out every single day and connect with the "people" with touchy feeling nanny statist stuff. I think Morris could do the same thing from the political right. He is in my opinion that shrewd.

The Chosen One is not as great a debator as he gets credit for. Someone who can study him and think "on their feet" quickly, emote warmth and concern, and can express their ideas with command of language would kick his behind. Bamster is all canned and teleprompter porduct. He memorizes his lines fairly well. Of course the MSM don't really question him much either.

I thought O'Reilly, who without a doubt is a genius, kicked his butt.

The repubs need someone like that. Bolten *may* be that one in my singular humble opinion. Though Bolten sounded just a *tad too* rough around the edges on Red Eye last week.

"He will be ridiculed for his call to bomb Iran, but that criticism may backfire by Nov. 2012. By then the threat posed by Iran's nuclear reality could be a serious concern."

Yes, like they did to Barry Goldwater who said if we go to Vietnam we should use nucs and do the job right. They made him look a nut. I remember my father, who voted for Johnson was afraid of Goldwater for this reason. My father is long dead but I am pretty sure he would feel differently with the Iran-Israel situation. Yet the left will try to do to Bolten the same "he is nuts" thing.

At this point, the country is like a seriously injured person with a severed femoral artery. This Nov. is our chance to apply the tourniquet. 2012 is when we can begin to address the rest of the trauma.

“Who was our last moustached president?” I ask John Bolton as we chat in his American Enterprise Institute office in downtown Washington, DC. “Taft,” he responds without hesitation, “And the last candidate was [Thomas] Dewey—not a comparison I’m excited about.” With a twinkle in his eye, he deadpans, “I think the American people would say it’s a complete non-issue.” The former US Ambassador to the United Nations may be willing to joke about his trademark facial hair, but as the 2012 election cycle looms, he sounds like a man who is seriously evaluating his own presidential aspirations.

Up to this point, Bolton has merely piqued the chattering class’ interest by refusing to foreclose the possibility of a presidential bid in a recent Daily Caller profile piece, and again during a Fox Business Network interview. Citing his chief priority of ensuring Republican gains in the 2010 midterm election, Bolton still won’t say if he’s planning to toss his hat into the ring, but now at least allows that he is “thinking about it very seriously”—a fairly significant rhetorical step toward to taking the plunge. It isn’t a new consideration either, he says. “I’ve been thinking about this really since it became clear early in the Obama administration that [the president’s] national security policy would be as bad as we feared it would be.”

Although Bolton denies he’s doing any heavy groundwork to set up a 2012 campaign, he’s not sitting still either. “What I am doing is talking to people who are experts on presidential campaigns because I’ve never run for elective office before,” he explains, before parenthetically pointing out that he is familiar with campaign finance law by dint of his work on the landmark 1976 Supreme Court case Buckley v. Valeo. I ask if he’s planning any trips to Iowa in the relatively near future, a question that he adroitly sidesteps with a chuckle and a change of subject.

If anyone doubts Bolton’s ability to withstand the rigors of a presidential bid, they ought to look no further than his grueling daily regimen. The 61-year-old Yale graduate wakes up every morning at 4 to read newspapers from across the globe, write, and prepare for media appearances and speeches. By the time most Americans slog into work, Bolton has already been absorbing information and generating content for five hours. As someone who requires very little sleep to function at a high level, Bolton finds the very early morning to be an especially productive period in his day because “the phone doesn’t ring at that time.” According to colleagues, Bolton also possesses a near-photographic memory, a quality he denies. “I wouldn’t go that far,” he says, chalking up his ability to retain enormous amounts of information to his training as a litigator.

Palin is an intuitive conservative, not an intellectual/scholar, and not a policy detail person like perhaps Paul Ryan or Gingrich.

She governed as a pragmatic conservative, not an ideologue. That record is gone now and replaced with the quitter ending.

She wasn't ready for Gibson and Couric. I don't know if people get a second chance. She was about 12 times more accurate than Biden in her debate. Still she came across there as trying too hard to stick to a few repetitive themes.

She rubs liberals the wrong way that's too bad. If she rubs our ownresidient conservative-centrist wrong - even a couple of years later - that is an electoral problem.

She is not the one I am looking for but acceptable to me. I place a high value on winning though so how well she brings people in is just as important as how she can energize the base. We need to do both!----We both pointed out that Bolton's stand on bombing Iran is controversial yet may become accepted wisdom. It proves he not just a follower of polls or pundits (though maybe a warmonger, kidding). People are war-fatigued so it will be hard to exude strength, though easy to contrast with Obama. Bolton was a recess appointment to Ambassadorship IIRC because the senate would not confirm him. That too may become a badge of honor but not a great early indicator of crossover appeal. I like that he understands if he wants to be considered, to step forward now. He already forced palin's hand in that regard. Regarding foreign policy, he was in the room for a period during most of the tough issues. Regarding economics, it sounds like he learned from some of the best conservative minds. There is plenty of time and we will see.

I am anti-Huckabee still and I can't see how Romney who signed different government healthcare is the guy to repeal-replace federal healthcare, no matter his stated positions. Giuliani got a nice decade off his name following 911 but disappointed last time and seems very out of the picture now. Gingrich...? Again acceptable to me but I don't think the winner. Huntsman was the centrist they were supposedly grooming for the job. It took 2 pages on google to even find him. Most of the new faces emerging now are too new to be President in '12. Obama lacked experience but he had burst onto the national political scene by 4 years previous to his election.

Too bad we can't get a pro-growth, pro-strength, pro-freedom, pro-constitution Democrat (why is that an oxymoron?) to win the nomination, hold his/her feet to the fire from congress and live with divided / bipartisan government.

Of all the perspective candidates for '12 that I see now, Mike Pence is my pick at this stage in the game. Very articulate, ultra-conservative, and very principled. I think he would make an excellent POTUS.

Logged

***Look at a man in the midst of doubt and danger, and you will determine in his hour of adversity what he really is***

" If she rubs our ownresidient conservative-centrist wrong - even a couple of years later - that is an electoral problem."

I am not sure if I am a conservative centrist. In theory I am right. But I don't agree hard right could win in the US. This is where I disagree with Hannity, Levin. But I could and would not even mind if I am wrong.

Candidates that are very conservative but unpolished like O'Donnell, and less so like Palidino, and even less so like Palin are flawed in this sound bite age. That said perhaps a strict right candidate could win in 2012 if he/she could express him/herself well.

While I like Dick Morris as a strategist much more than Karl Rove, Rove was right about O'Donnell.

For goodness sakes it looks like we have a high school girl (even if she is 34?) who could never pay her own bills running for the US Senate. She isn't much better than that guy Green in NC.